Whether energetic materials are to be employed as explosives, incendiaries, concussives, or other uses, they must be evaluated with regard to many properties to determine their suitable for such different uses. Such parameters may include ignitability, flamespread, pressure characteristics, thermal characteristics, energetic material interaction, and others. Traditional methods of examining energetic materials include large scale field tests and smaller scale analysis in test chambers.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,545,252 describes a flammability test chamber which may be evacuated, filled with a desired gaseous environment for testing the test material, an ignition means, a probe for positioning of the test material, and a heating means. The chamber is essentially a crude explosion chamber, and it is incapable of the data collection achieved by the instant invention.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,578,756 describes an Autoignition Test Cell similar to that of U.S. Pat. No. 3,545,252. U.S. Pat. No. 4,990,312 describes a high-pressure promoted combustion chamber having a plurality of viewing ports. U.S. Pat. No. 6,354,137 describes a testing chamber for small amounts of explosive. U.S. Pat. No. 7,159,448 describes a pressure-determining combustion chamber, comprising a sensor having a piezoresistive thin metallic layer. U.S. Pat. No. 3,820,435 describes a system said to be useful for high-explosive studies, and “readily allows flash radiography of an event as it occurs. U.S. Pat. No. 7,128,057 describes a device for determining fuel quality.
While these test chambers may provide certain useful data, they are not readily adaptable to providing data regarding a plurality of properties (e.g., temperature, pressure, flammability, etc.) all in a single test. Moreover, they are not readily adaptable to the investigation of an energetic material's interaction with other energetic materials. In contrast, as indicated below, the inventive apparatus may be used to evaluate any single energetic material reaction or interactions between several energetic materials. Applications include evaluation of ignition behavior of an ignition energetic material against another material. The apparatus includes a method to control rupture pressure to evaluate the energetic material response to different rupture pressures.
The destruction of explosive mine rubble is a dangerous endeavor. Typically, energetic material is employed for such destruction, however, determining suitable compositions to be used for this purpose has essentially required full scale testing in the field in order to ascertain the particular characteristics of the composition, its effectiveness in destroying rubble, the attendant environment of the destruction process, and other parameters. Full scale field testing is prohibitively expensive, is capable of testing only a single composition per field test, and bears the risk of destroying the very instruments employed to collect data for the evaluation of the material.
The testing chambers in the art are unable to provide the necessary analysis because they do not provide results for multiple parameters and they are not suitable for interaction analysis.
The art is in need of improved tools for analyzing energetic materials.